Coronavirus vaccines may have a bigger impact than expected on hospitalisations and deaths, according to the HSE.

It comes after the number of cases confirmed in nursing homes fell by more than 80% last week.

There has also been a huge drop in cases among healthcare workers and yesterday, the number of COVID-19 patients in Irish hospitals fell below 600 for the first time this year.

On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, HSE Chief Clinical Officer Dr Colm Henry said it is “very tempting” to say the vaccine rollout is already working.

“Let’s focus on two groups,” he said. “First of all, residents of long-term healthcare settings.”

“We have seen a big reduction in the number of lab-confirmed cases.

“Up until the end of the week of Feb 14th there were 482 cases. Now one week later, we are down to 91. Some of that can be explained by the fall in community transmission but the fall is so huge, it is very tempting to say there is, at the very least, a big contribution through the vaccine rollout.

“The other big feature is the fall in healthcare workers.

“We have seen a fall from just over 1,000 cases just a few weeks ago to now 50 or 60 cases. A big, big drop and that coincides, if we track it, with the vaccination.”

Vaccine

He said data from countries that have already hit high vaccination rates suggests the vaccines may be even more effective than hoped.

“More importantly, if we didn’t know what happened in Israel, we would say, ‘well, maybe we need some more time to read into it’ but we know these were the signals Israel got.

“Now there is really strong evidence coming from Israel, from Scotland and other places of big, big drops in hospitalisations and serious illness in all age groups beyond what even the trials might have predicted.”

Nursing homes

Dr Henry said the fall in nursing home rates will see visits to nursing homes resume before long.

“In short, it should and it will but, just to remind people, we are coming out of a month in January where there were almost 1,300 deaths from COVID, many of them in nursing home settings," he said.

“One of the big dividends for nursing home residents of course is the huge drop in serious illness and particularly in deaths as a result of the rollout of this vaccine here.

“But yes, of course we want to resume visits in some sort of controlled way; in some sort of sort of a safe way as we did before and we are looking at this right now to see how we can reintroduce those – bearing in mind we are just coming out of a serious surge in cases which had a very significant impact on nursing homes.”

Hospital surge

He said the threat of the health service being overwhelmed by cases is receding for now, but warned, “we are never out of the woods in the health service.”

“The hard lesson for all of us is that complacency is so dangerous in this game,” he said.

“Look at what happened us in December. We were the best performing country in Europe at the beginning of December and we ended up being almost the worst in a month.”

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